Greenie watch

A SURVIVOR of Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires has told a royal commission that conservation laws were so strict in her shire that it was illegal to clear away debris on her own property, such as a limb fallen from a tree. Toni-anne Collins, who lost her 40ha property in Ninks Road, St Andrews, told the Teague royal commission that clearing native vegetation on her property was totally prohibited under rural conservation and environmental regulations.

Kimberly Dripps, a biodiversity director with the state’s Department of Sustainability and Environment,(read Greenie) said that under “like for like” regulations in Victoria, a property owner could remove a eucalypt and replace it with a deciduous tree, so long as they also planted an offsetting eucalypt, or similar tree, elsewhere in the state. Ms Dripps said tree removal was one of the causes of human-induced climate change.

And people like you, Ms Dipps, are one of the causes of human induced death and, could I point out, the woman was talking about not be allowed to remove dead fall, not cutting down trees. Trees are important to the ecology but humans are important to society and they should be able to clear vegetation close to their houses. The same people might also expect the local forests to be cleared of dead fall from time to time by winter back-burning to minimize fuel for the bush fires but I guess that’s another subject. Another mob of dangerous Greenies have done their level best to stifle agriculture in the tropics with the release of their report that only considered the north’s agricultural potential in terms of available groundwater supplies and not surface water and dams. My old Army mate Dennis Quick now living just south of Cairns has his say;

MOST thinking people would be absolutely gobsmacked by the levels of ideological bias and “Ruddspeak” that has emanated from the Northern Australian Land and Water Taskforce report. The carefully selected Labor replacements of the original taskforce members have published a turgid grab bag of gobbledygook that defies belief. In so doing, they have, in complicity with their political masters, denied many small communities on Cape York and across the Far North, any semblance of real hope for economic and social gain over the coming years. There is not one substantive recommendation that comes out of the report. It’s nothing but a mirror of the clap trap that emanates from the Wilderness Society and other extremist groups that have captured Labor governments with their preferences blackmail.

The Rudd government put a Greenie in charge to achieve a politically expedient outcome as Senator Boswell notes

…the inclusion on the taskforce of Northern Territory environmentalist Stuart Blanch, who played a role in preventing the territory government from clearing 110,000ha near the Daly River for agriculture. “The last person you’d put on is a green environmentalist,” Senator Boswell said. “You know what they think before they even go on there . . . they don’t want dams, they just want things left as is and turned into a big national park.”

The problem is, as the election year progresses, green votes will become more and more important to Rudd so we can expect a huge shift to the left in his dealings with the environment. Its a pity and will damage or put on hold needed development, but like painful and long route marches – they do end and so will the Rudd government.